Secret Service Finds Allegations Of "Kill Him" Unfounded

You'll have to click on the image to see it larger. But when you do you will see that I had a visitor YESTERDAY who specifically wanted ONLY stories about racist remarks at the McCain rallys. You'll see my blog post came up and was clicked on. Thank goodness the sentence that follows under my headline was used in the results.



Below is another site that posted the actual story and below that is a comment from another blogger's visitor who I think really hits the nail on the head.



SCRANTON – The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama’s name a man in the audience shouted “kill him.”

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.



Somehow I doubt that the mere fact that their is no evidence here is going to carry much weight on college campuses. A familiar feature of various “j’accuse” campus incidents seems to be that what counts is not whether something actually happened, but whether it could have happened.

That is, if the alleged incident matches the observer’s viewpoint, then it may as well have happened (even if it didn’t).

Consider, for example, the alleged rape of a black stripper by white Lacrosse team members at Duke University. How many believed it (sans credible evidence) simply because it fit their internal narratives of white privilege and black victims?

And so, for many, it doesn’t really matter whether the incident actually happened– because it could have happened, and therefore it might have happened and even if it didn’t, what difference does that make anyway?